I woke up to a call from Vincent van Gogh today. He told me he wants the Just Stop Oil protesters who threw soup on his Sunflowers to be released immediately. I nodded and promised to do everything I could to ensure Phoebe and Anna would be freed soon. Our conversation continued. “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” Van Gogh remarked. “We must try and keep courage alive.”
He sounded upset about the sentence given the other day to Just Stop Oil activists – two years in jail for Phoebe Plummer, 23; 20 months for Anna Holland, 22. I sympathise with him. He seemed crestfallen that two young women were being thrown behind bars because a judge deified him and his painting, which, in Van Gogh’s mind, was not meant to be venerated, but instead inspire young artists and activists to do exactly what Phoebe and Anna had done – to push the boundaries of life and art even further, and raise uncomfortable questions.
During his lifetime, Van Gogh was a pariah. No one would buy his paintings, and he suffered from numerous untreated mental illnesses. He also lived in desperate poverty. A few months before painting Sunflowers – desperate, unrecognised and lonely – Van Gogh cut off his ear. Years after his suicide, the art market finally caught up with Van Gogh. The art world tends to love artists more when they’re dead. When artists are alive, they’re often too unpredictable and opinionated for their work to be easily commodified.
Nature was Van Gogh’s ultimate muse. He loved it, as do Phoebe and Anna. I believe he would have approved of Phoebe and Anna’s action – it belonging to the tradition of activists and artists defying norms to create a new, better world. In the case of Just Stop Oil, to save our one and only planet from destruction and protect the natural world that Van Gogh so loved. Their protest is part of the legacy that he himself contributed to, followed by the surrealists, dadaists, Fluxus, the Young British Artists and many others whose works now sell for millions and grace the walls of prestigious museums. One of the most iconic of Ai Weiwei’s works is Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn in 1995, in which he destroyed a 2,000-year-old vase. Banksy set his own painting to self-destruct after a $1.4m sale. Breaking and destroying is a valid and striking artistic and political statement.
“The action you took was extreme, disproportionate and criminally idiotic, given the risks involved,” the judge, Christopher Hehir, said when sentencing Phoebe and Anna. “There is nothing peaceful or nonviolent about throwing soup. Throwing soup in someone’s face is violent.” Of course, the soup wasn’t thrown in someone’s face but on to the glass protecting the painting, which the protesters were aware of. The painting wasn’t damaged at all. Would Van Gogh have cared? Art critics, artists and professors should have testified in their trial – and I imagine their collective answer would be far more nuanced than the judge’s simplistic interpretation of events. It is a tragedy that the decision was left to an arrogant judge who views the action solely as “an extreme harm to society”.
“In Parliament Square, the beating heart of democracy in the UK, there are statues of Pankhurst, Gandhi, and Mandela … Why?” Phoebe asked at the trial. “Because these people fought for our democracy. They battled to bring about the rights we see today. And how did they do that? They broke the law to bring about justice when the society they lived in was unjust.” Well-behaved women seldom make history; and fortunately for Phoebe and Anna, history is on their side.
Their action was a carefully calibrated political statement, not the work of mindless hooligans. Yet I see so much contempt, even cruelty, directed at these young idealistic women, even from people in the art world that I hold dear. If you are one of them, I urge you to break free from the shackles of cynicism and conformity. Remember what it was like to be young and dream of a better world. Have sympathy, if not admiration, for these women. Listen to their articulate and thoughtful words, and think twice about whether you want to live in a world that cages intellectuals and dreamers while glorifying and rewarding corrupt, greedy oil CEOs who destroy the planet.
There was no damage to the Van Gogh painting – but there was damage to “society”, according to Hehir. If society is the victim, as he judge said, then it must be society that speaks up and corrects this wrong. We must demand the release of these two young women, whose important years are being cruelly stripped away from them. I know Vincent would.
Nadya Tolokonnikova is the creator of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot and former political prisoner
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